The Pearl objecting to project's parking

Updated 12:27 am, Thursday, December 20, 2012

Let the parking wars begin.

From the sounds of a skirmish this week at the San Antonio Zoning Commission, the battleground is a burgeoning stretch of Broadway near the Pearl Brewery.

At the hearing, Mark Tolley was trying to convince commissioners to rezone the Broadway Carwash, abandoned at the northwest corner of Interstate 35 and Broadway, from industrial to “IDZ,” or infill development zone. For developers, the latter district is ideal because it waives any requirements for parking spaces.

Tolley and the property's owner, Michael Padron, are planning a three-story structure designed by Lake Flato architects with an open-stall green grocer, leased and operated by County Commissioner Kevin Wolff, on the ground floor, a high-end restaurant on the second and a rooftop bar on the third. City staff had recommended the desired rezoning — not a surprise; officials have lured development to the Midtown core by handing out IDZ districts like sweets.

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But commissioners at the hearing were facing objections from a certain high-profile neighbor: the Pearl. Its owners had deployed lawyer Frank Burney to lobby against the rezoning for Padron.

“We are not seeking any competitive advantage or disadvantage,” Burney told the commission. “We just want to make sure (the project) is developed in an orderly fashion with adequate parking and adequate transit facilities like bike lanes that we've put in, and hopefully a streetcar some day.

“And that's our whole issue, just parking.”

There's a certain amount of irony in the Pearl lobbying against an IDZ district for a neighbor, for the Pearl itself is a beneficiary of the zoning incentive.

Without the waiver, a developer is required to add one parking space per 100 square feet of a project. At more than 404,000 square feet, the Pearl offers about 1,500 parking spaces for its patrons; sticking to suburban standards would've required it to construct more than twice the spaces.

Last month, Tolley sought an IDZ for the Broadway Carwash project with 33 parking spaces. The Pearl objected, and commissioners postponed a vote. Returning Tuesday, Tolley had reduced the size of the structure to 27,000 square feet and increased parking to 121 spaces.

“It seems a little unfair,” he told me. “We're doing what they did. We're emulating them. And we hope that would be satisfactory to them.”

Tolley managed to appease the commissioners, who unanimously approved the rezoning against the Pearl's objections. Commissioner Orlando Salazar, however, voiced some wariness.

“Eventually people don't want to fight for parking,” he said. “We don't have sufficient parking here for this. And these developments are only going to be successful if they draw people and people can park.”

Salazar was foreshadowing a collision between this city's culture of cars and its longing to get people onto sidewalks and bicycles in its urban core. This transformation will inevitably be messy.

The Pearl's tactics may seem hypocritical, but they also reflect a harsh reality: Unless developers add enough parking, their patrons will only pile into the Pearl, which stimulated the area's growth in the first place.

Tolley admires the Pearl, but he also senses a brewing war.

Its opposition “came at a tipping point for them when they realized they might be victims of their own success, and we kind of garnered their wrath because of that,” he said. “There definitely is a push coming, and I think we are the first ones to feel it.”